website hosting

Improving the Lodge

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The Lodge is now Speedier

Speed RacerSome of you may have noticed an improvement in site performance, i.e., page and image load times – over the last month or so. I had two most fortunate things happen in the past two months.

First off, my VPS host upgraded all of their plans by lessening the amount of accounts per server, in turn increasing the amount of shared resources available. End result, I was given a little more memory and CPU juice — both of which this site needs in large supply in order to run like a champ. And by the way… I’ve dealt with a plethora of webhosts over the years, and these guys are tops. I highly recommend ServInt to any of you who may be looking for ‘managed’ VPS hosting. They f**king rock. The performance is stellar and the support even more so.

Next… early last month I had a gentleman contact me regarding sponsored CDN service. For those of you that don’t know what a CDN is, don’t feel bad… I wasn’t really all that familiar with the service myself.

He sent me an email that read something like this…

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Special thanks

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…to those of you who went the extra step to thank we with a monetary token of gratitude in regards to my semi-rant concerning my hosting woes. Considering the whopping $89 I have to cough up each month for VPS hosting to power the HL, every little bit helps. 🙂 In fact, thanks in large part to one very generous …

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Just a heads-up…

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You may notice a few things changing around here in the coming week. So, if things start looking odd or different, know that the site’s not experiencing technical difficulties, I’m just taking steps to try and reduce overhead.

With the amount of traffic that this site gets, combined with the resource hog that is the forum, Huntsman’s Lodge is now costing me a whopping $89/mo. to host. The days of me decorating the site to my heart’s content are over… sadly. 🙁

You’ll also notice that I’ve been uploading slightly smaller screenshots in an effort to curb the resource usage.

This ship will continue its course, but I need to jettison a bit of the cargo in order to help keep it afloat. I’ve gotten accustomed to paying premium hosting fees to maintain this beast, but one large per year is where I gotta draw the line.

And for those of you who feel like tipping your hat to me, there is a handy donation feature in the sidebar… just sayin’.

I know I run ads on here, but it ain’t like I’m gettin’ rich by any means. With the amount of hours I’ve contributed to this site over the years, combined with the out-of-pocket expenses, the total costs involved with maintaining this site are insane.

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I Was Not Prepared

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WoW.com strikes again

While trying to update the site yesterday, I started getting these horrendously long load times, time-outs and finally error messages when attempting to navigate anywhere within the site. I’m accustomed to short periods of downtime due to high server loads, Apache reboots, and what not, but then this started to get a little too excessive for my liking.

I began firing support tickets over to the server admins to get this whole thing sorted out. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to access the back end to reply to the previous day’s comments. After several minutes I finally managed to get the admin area to load and what’s the first thing I see when I look at my recent comments…

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We’re Out of the Woods

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Out of the Woods

…or at least I think we are. There may be some minor things to address, but the bulk of it is behind me.

After the nightmare that was my upgrade to a VPS server, I’m happy to announce that HuntsmansLodge is back up and fully operational. 🙂

Those of you that follow the blog may recall me having mentioned some weeks back that upgrading to a VPS was in my imminent future. I had been warned a few times over the past few months that my site was violating my hosting company’s Terms of Service by using up too much of the server resources. I tried optimizing the site further, but to no avail. Not only was I no longer welcome on a shared server, but I had my neighbors calling the cops on me when there was a party and the site saw a traffic spike.

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